I ’VE KNOWN THE AUTHOR AND CONSERVATIONIST Carl Safina for nearly two decades now. I’ve studied the dogged way he challenged destructive U.S. fisheries practices and earned one of the nation’s most prestigious fellowships in the process. I’ve read drafts of his books-in-progress and seen the way he transforms hours of meticulous field study into lyrical, heartrending (and best-selling) narratives about everything from albatrosses to orcas. These works helped make him, according to Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s former director John Fitzpatrick, “among the most inspiring and forward-thinking naturalists, conservation activists, and writers in our generation.” I’ve observed the push-pull in Carl’s heart that alternately drives him to document tragic environmental losses in the world’s far-flung corners or retreat to his private woodland just to be quiet with a small, local circle of nonhumans.
Truly, I felt I knew him. But recently I’ve started to suspect there’s an owl who knows him more intimately.
The bird in question is a five-year-old Eastern Screech-Owl whom Carl calls Alfie. An animal rehabilitator rescued her as a chick—possibly the discarded prey of a careless crow—and brought her to Carl in the summer of 2018 so matted and infested with fly eggs that she couldn’t determine the species. Being a field-trained ecologist, a former falconer, and a rescuer of other birds, Carl knew he had a screech-owl on his hands. That she was female he would learn only later when he successfully supported Alfie’s transition to free-living adulthood and watched her rear a brood of chicks. In fact, he chose the neutral-sounding name “Alfie” (derived from The Little Rascals’ character Alfalfa) because at first her sex was a mystery.
But the greatest mystery Carl would uncover in Alfie was that, over time, she became more and more. Nor a hierarchical arrangement of domestication like the one between John Grogan and his Labrador retriever in Rather, this was a relationship built on the wonder of two very different creatures finding commonality across the gulf of evolutionary divergence; a relationship that stirred Carl to probe the very essence of humanity’s connection to nature in his new book, .
